Intel is
seeking to expand beyond PCs and into the mobile market, where ARM has
dominated thanks to licensees such as Qualcomm, NVIDIA, and Texas Instruments.

Intelrecently
announcedits new 22nm 3D
Tri-Gate transistors that will boost performance by up to 37 percent compared
to existing 32nm technology. It's all part of the company's focus on increasing
performance while lowering power consumption -- a move aimed directly at ARM
and its hold on the smartphone and tablet market.

Intel is
launching a new set of Atom chips,codenamed Oak Trail,
specifically for tablets. "While the project improves Intel's position,
analysts say the company faces an uphill struggle, as it comes late to the game
and is also handicapped by its lack of strong partnerships and applications
designed for Android or other popular tablet operating systems, unlike its
position in the PC world with Microsoft Inc.'s Windows,"WSJreports.

But Navin
Shenoy, Intel's general manager for Asia-Pacific, toldWSJthat more than 35 Intel-chip-based
tablets are targeted to ship by the end of the year. He also mentioned that component
shortages from Japandid not
affect Intel's supply chain.

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Quite. For those without the history: Digital's Alpha team made an ARM-compatible StrongARM chip tuned to the Alpha's process, which - due to this tuning - hit 200MHz when the ARM7 hit 40MHz and the ARM8 was failing to appear - this was around the time of the 133MHz Pentium. Intel acquired the team in question and produced XScale chips for a while. ARMs in general are designed to be quite process-portable; it's very possible that Intel could produce an ARM core tuned to their process at a very high clock speed/low power.

The problem is that ARMs tend to get used in highly-integrated systems - the ARM is effectively a bolt-on bit of custom IP, just like a memory controller or TMDS transceiver. I doubt Intel are in the market for producing lots of variations to accommodate their customers - their current strategy (at least in CPU space) is shoving a few similar parts out the door and getting economies of scale.

A year or two ago they signed a deal with TSMC to make atom based SoC's to the customers specs. When interest failed to materialize they quietly scrapped it. There's no reason to assume they wouldn't re-approve it if interest were to materialize in the future.